Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, has said there may be two rounds of the 2027 presidential elections. Speaking on the Sunday Politics programme on Channels Television yesterday, el-Rufai said there is a possibility that no candidate would secure the required majority in the first round.
“The worst case scenario in the 2027 election is that no winner will emerge in the first round, and we may have to run off, and Bola Tinubu will not be on the ballot for the runoff because he would at best come third; he has no path to win,” he said. El-Rufai had earlier said the opposition coalition would send Tinubu back to Lagos in the 2027 elections.
The former Kaduna governor had also said Nigeria was at risk if the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) wins the 2027 elections. Speaking further he said he is not bothered by critics who describe him as a fundamentalist.
El-Rufai dismissed such views, insisting that those who hold them neither know him personally nor have worked with him. “I don’t care. The people that think I am a fundamentalist don’t know me, they have never met me, they have formed their opinion,” he said. “Frankly, the reason why my enemies are very vehement at hating me is because I don’t care what they think.
It’s the way I am. I am very comfortable with what I am. I don’t care what you think. Those that work with me know me,” he said yesterday. Asked about perceptions in parts of Southern Kaduna that his leadership style reflected hostility towards them, El-Rufai rejected the notion. “They can think what they think. I don’t tolerate nonsense, governance is not a joke,” he stated. The former governor noted that:
“When you’re governing 10 million people as I did in Kaduna, you must discriminate between A and B. Nobody can blackmail me because he is a Christian, the law doesn’t apply to him.
“There are people in Southern Kaduna that feel entitled to behave in a certain way, I dealt with them. Some of the closest people I worked with in government are from Southern Kaduna. They know that this is not true.”
